Migrating from WooCommerce to Shopify Plus: what we check first

Most clients come to us at the same point: the WooCommerce store works, but every change costs more and more. Every campaign, new market or subscription rule adds another plugin, and the site becomes slower and harder to maintain. Shopify Plus moves part of that complexity to the platform: hosting, security, checkout and scaling for traffic peaks.

Migration alone does not solve the problems, though. If we move the same tangled processes to a new platform, we get the same store, only more expensive.

We start with a complete inventory: products and variants, collections, customers, order history, reviews, gift cards and subscriptions. For each type of data we decide what we move, what we archive and what we leave behind.

• Products with more than 100 variants need to be restructured for Shopify.
• Custom fields (ACF, meta) become metafields.
• Customer passwords cannot be migrated, so we prepare an account reactivation flow.
• Active subscriptions can only move together with the payment provider.

Every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. We export every indexed address from Google Search Console and the sitemap, map them one by one and test them automatically before launch. This is the step that protects organic traffic built over years.

For every WooCommerce plugin we look for the equivalent: a native Shopify feature, an App Store app or an integration we build ourselves. We rebuild ERP, CRM and courier integrations on the Shopify APIs (REST and GraphQL), with monitoring for every sync.

We schedule the launch in a low-traffic window. The day before, we run a delta migration of new orders and customers, switch DNS, test checkout with real payments and watch the first 72 hours: 404 errors, conversion, page speed.

After launch we stay close. The first weeks bring the adjustments nobody foresaw during planning.